@darius @jasontucker Yeah, you need something 'in the middle' that's locked down but still suited for situations where you don't have full access to the HTML itself. Google (site verification) solves this somewhat crudely by offering a choice of 4-5 methods in the hope you can get one of them to work.

@darius It would be good if there were other methods than rel=me for sites where you don't have access to the HTML, especially other social media sites. Perhaps something like a plain link to your Mastodon profile with ?rel=me appended could have the same effect?

@feditips This isn't harmful at all – no more so than the existence of the Mastodon app itself.

It's just an "easy mode" for people to sign up without having to understand a bunch of stuff first. Good for people who have heard of Mastodon and gone to the app store and typed in "Mastodon" without doing all this homework people think they should be doing.

As they learn, they might make different decisions. Or not! (I've stuck around on .social)

Campaigning against this doesn't help new users.